The present invention relates to a process for the manufacture of a decorated bottle, the bottle having a handle. In particular it relates to a bottle having a decorated sleeve shrunk around the outside of the bottle.
Bottles are widely used in consumer goods industry for packaging various type of fluid products. Such bottles are normally decorated, often using labels which are stuck onto the bottle. Such labels are typically used not only for decoration but also to display usage instructions or information on the composition of the content for example. However, conventional labelling technology such as wet glue labels, self-adhesive labels, or in mold labels do not allow to decorate the full bottle surface area. The accumulation of such visual signals led the industry to develop new approaches allowing higher decoration coverage of the container""s surface, one of these new approaches being the shrink-sleeving of packages.
Shrink-sleeving is mostly used in the drinks industry, whereby a sleeve of thermoplastic material may be shrunk all around a beverage bottle, thus offering an extended area which may be used for any type of graphics. Typical thermoplastic materials used for shrink sleeving include polyvinylchloride (PVC); low or high density polyethylene (LDPE, HDPE); polyester teraphthalate (PET); polypropylene (PP) and oriented polypropylene (OPP); polystyrene (PS) and oriented polystyrene (OPS); and mixtures thereof.
However, use of shrink-sleeving did not extend to relatively larger containers, particularly because of the need of a side handle when such containers are used. Indeed, the sleeving of a bottle consists in inserting the bottle into a straight sleeve of thermoplastic material, the thermoplastic then being heated to shrink and fit tightly around the container. Clearly, in case of a container or bottle having a side handle, such a process would lead to preventing access to the handle as the sleeve would cover the recess produced by the handle, so that the handle cannot be gripped.
EP-A-0 609 575, published on Aug. 10, 1994, discloses a sleeved bottle having a handle which merges with the side of the bottle at two regions (i.e. top and bottom of the handle). The sleeve is provided with a cut-out substantially corresponding to the position of the gripping handle. However, when a shrink-sleeving process is used, it has been found to be difficult to assemble the sleeve and the bottle in such a way that the size and position of the cut-out is always accurate. The cut-out must be relatively large in order to extend between both of the two merged regions of the handle and bottle, so that the cut-out region encompasses the whole handle. The relatively large cut-out is prone to misalignment and or tearing during the sleeving process. Furthermore the process may leave sharp, exposed edges of the sleeve around the cut-out region which may cause discomfort to the user or, in extreme cases, may cut the finger of the user.
The present invention addresses the problems by providing a bottle having a sleeve around the outside of the bottle, and having a handle, the handle being substantially exposed outside of the sleeve.
The process of the present invention comprises the steps of:
a) forming a bottle with a handle, the handle having opposing ends, wherein one end of the handle merges with the bottle in a merging region, and the other end of the handle is a free end;
b) forming a sleeve essentially in the shape of a tube, the sleeve having at least one cut-out region which is defined on all sides by the sleeve, and wherein the profile of the cut-out region is at least as big as the cross-sectional profile of the free end of the handle;
c) opening the generally tubular sleeve and disposing the open sleeve over the bottle;
d) displacing the sleeve relative to the bottle so that the cut-out region of the sleeve is adjacent to the free end of the handle;
e) deforming the sleeve so that the cut-out region encompasses the free end of the handle;
f) displacing the sleeve relative to the bottle so that the sleeve generally surrounds the bottle, and so that the handle is disposed through the cut-out region of the sleeve; and
g) shrinking the sleeve to the outer surface of the bottle.